informed Don Espriella that his pills always
performed and even exceeded whatever he promised,
as if they were impatient of immortal and
universal fame.

The ceremony of proclaiming peace,
suggested to Don Espriella that the English
understand nothing of out-door pageantry; nor have
they since improved their understandings in
this matter. But the illumination was impressive,
because the mob's habit of breaking every
window that was not filled with candles—
whether they should be arranged in straight
lines or arches was the only choice permitted
to the householder—secured a wonderful
completeness in the lighting of the streets. The
streets were thronged, the middle of them
filled with coaches locked together, much as
happens at illuminations now-a-days. But the
effect of the old system of lighting all the
windows in a street, whether or not there were
coloured oil lamps and transparencies, must
have been more striking than our intermittent
flare of gas in ciphers, crowns, and stars.
The grand illumination to which sightseers
pressed in April eighteen hundred and two, was
at the house of M. Otto, the French Ambassador,
in Portman-square. The inscription on
his house was, "Peace and Amity." It had
been "Peace and Concord," but a party of
sailors who went by in the morning had
insisted that they were not conquered, and that
no Frenchman should say so.

Another event of that time to which Espriella
gives a letter, was the execution of Governor
Wall for flogging soldiers to death at Goree.
Mutineers in the fleet had recently been
hanged; and the hanging of the detested
Governor Wall was looked upon as earnest of
equal laws. When he came on the gallows, he
was received by a vast mob with three huzzas,
and basket-women under him were drinking to
his damnation in gin and brimstone. When
the drop fell, the mob began their huzzas again,
but instead of proceeding to the usual three
cheers, stopped suddenly at the first cheer, and
became silent. The revengeful joy, bad as it
was, had been based on humanity; and, wrote
Southey, "the sudden extinction of that joy,
the feeling which at one moment struck so
many thousands, stopped their acclamations at
once, and awed them into a dead silence when
they saw the object of their hatred in the act
and agony of death, is surely as honourable to
the popular character as any trait which I have
seen recorded of any people in any age or
country."

And then he proceeds to condemn the
barbarousness of the martial laws of England.
Nobody seemed to recollect that Governor
Wall was hanged, not for having flogged three
men to death, but for an informality in the
mode of doing it. Had he called a drumhead
court martial, the same sentence might have
been inflicted, and the same consequences have
ensued, with perfect impunity to himself. For
in those days, an offender was sometimes
sentenced to a thousand lashes. A surgeon stood
by to feel his pulse during the execution, and
determine how long the flogging could be
continued without killing him. When human
nature could sustain no more, he was remanded
to prison; his wound—for from the shoulders
to the loins it left him one great wound—was
dressed, and as soon as it was sufficiently healed
to be laid open again in the same manner, he was
brought out again to undergo the remainder of
his sentence. So Robert Southey wrote in his
assumed character of Don Manuel Alvarez
Espriella.

We turn to a few lighter shades of English
manners at the outset of the nineteenth century.
The huge and hideous wig, once worn by all
the learned, and worn still by our judges, had
then been discarded by physicians, but was to
be met with in the streets upon the heads of
schoolmasters and doctors of divinity. Don
Manuel, when he described the luxuries of
London diet, told how soda-water and other
factitious waters had become fashionable, and
added that the common water was abominable:
being either from a vapid canal in which all the
rabble of the outskirts washed themselves in
summer, or from the Thames, which received all
the filth of the City. Over his friend's mahogany,
he told the history of the introduction of
that wood into our households. A West Indian
captain, about a century before, had brought
some logs of it as ballast for his ship, and gave
them to his brother Dr. Gibbons, an eminent
physician, who was then building a house. The
wood was thrown aside as too hard for the
workmen's tools. Some time afterwards, his
wife wanted a candle-box. The doctor thought
of the West Indian wood, and out of that the
box was made. Its colour and polish tempted
the doctor to have a bureau made of the same
material, and this was thought so beautiful that
it was shown to all his friends. The Duchess
of Buckingham, who came to look at it, begged
wood enough to make another bureau for
herself. Then the demand arose for more, and
Honduras mahogany became a common article
of trade.

The passion for collecting, in which the actual
desirableness of the thing collected goes for
little, was as great sixty years ago, as in these
days which produce a Postage Stamp Collector's
Manual. There was a superstition that a Queen
Anne's farthing was worth five hundred pounds;
and Southey vouches for the story of a
pettifogging lawyer, as ignorant as he was villainous,
who suborned a soldier to charge a man with
robbing him on the highway of eight pounds,
some silver, and a Queen Anne's farthing. The
accused man was able to prove his innocence,
and the lawyer failed in his plot to hang him
that he might obtain possession of the farthing.
At a sale of curiosities a single shell was bought
at a very high price. The buyer held it up to
the company: "There are but two specimens
of this shell," said he, "known to be in
existence, and I have the other," and he set his foot
upon it and crushed it to pieces.

Espriella condemned capital punishments for